Galloway, New Jersey · Small business websites

Most websites in Atlantic County are not broken. They are unfinished, and nobody ever went back.

We are a web designer in Galloway, New Jersey, and we spend a lot of time looking at small business websites in the 609. Absecon, Egg Harbor Township, Mays Landing, Hammonton, Somers Point, Northfield, Linwood, Pleasantville. The same handful of defects turn up again and again, and almost none of them are design problems. They are the last ten percent of a build that somebody stopped short of finishing, usually years ago, usually because the site went live on a deadline and everyone moved on.

The costly part is that the owner cannot see any of it. On a desktop, at the office, the site looks like the site. The failures live on the phone, which is where nearly every customer in this county actually opens it.

So here is the check we run first, written out so you can run it yourself on your own website in about ten minutes, in a browser, without buying anything from us or anybody else.

Run this yourself

The ten minute check on your own website

Do this on your phone, not your computer. Every one of these is a defect we have found on a live New Jersey small business website, not a hypothetical.

Tap your phone number. The dialler should open with the number already in it. If a page loads instead, or nothing happens at all, the link is missing the tel: part and no customer has ever been able to tap it to call you.
Tap your Call Us button. Test it separately. We have seen a Call Us button that was wired to a contact page rather than to a number, which means every person who pressed it landed on a form instead of on the phone with you.
Tap your email address. Your mail app should open with the address filled in. If a browser tab opens and tries to load something like http://info@yourbusiness.com, the link was built as a web address instead of a mailto: link, and it goes nowhere.
Read your homepage out loud, every line. You are looking for text the template shipped with. Lorem ipsum. The words Business Tagline. Anything that reads like filler because it is filler. It is easy to stop seeing after the hundredth visit, and reading aloud is what breaks the habit.
Look for anything in braces or brackets. Something like {{business_name}} or [City] printed as visible text means a template token never got filled in. It looks like a bug to a customer, because it is one.
Read your testimonials and check the industry. Templates ship with sample reviews. We have found a site where the quotes praised a completely different trade than the one the business is in, left exactly where the template put them. A visitor who reads carefully now knows the reviews are not yours.
Look at every photograph. Is it your building, your crew, your work? Or is it the stock family the template came with? Your real photos, taken on a phone, beat professional stock images for a local business every time, because they prove you exist here.
Fill in your own contact form and send it. Three things to watch. Does a confirmation message appear, does that message read as a complete sentence with no word missing, and does the email actually arrive in the inbox you check. A form that silently fails is the most expensive defect on this list.
Check your facts, digit by digit. Phone number, address, hours, and the one line that states how long you have been in business. We have found a typo in that sentence on a live site. It is a small thing that undercuts the exact claim it was written to make.
Scroll sideways. With the phone upright, try to swipe the page left and right. If it moves, something is wider than the screen and your layout is broken on the device most of your customers use.

0 or 1 out of 10. Your site is in good shape and you do not need a web designer today. Put a note in your calendar to run this again after the next change anybody makes to the site, because that is when items reappear.

2 to 4 out of 10. Normal, and worth an afternoon. These are almost always small fixes rather than a rebuild. Whoever built the site can usually clear the list quickly if you send them the specific items rather than saying it needs work.

5 or more out of 10. The site was never finished. That is a different problem from a site that is out of date, and it is usually cheaper to solve than owners expect, because the structure is already there. Start with the phone link and the contact form, in that order. Those two are the ones costing you calls right now.

Why the phone link is the one to fix first

A link to a phone number has to tell the phone that it is a phone number. Written correctly it looks like this, and this is our own number, so you can tap it and watch it work:

(609) 363-5141

Behind that link the address is tel:+16093635141. When the tel: part is missing, the browser assumes it is a web page and tries to load one, so the tap lands somewhere useless and the caller gives up. Nothing on the page looks wrong. Nobody reports it, because a person who cannot reach you does not write in to say so.

You can check any link yourself. On a desktop, right click the phone number and copy the link address, then paste it somewhere you can read it. It should begin with tel: and it should contain only digits and a plus sign after that.

The same logic covers the email link. An email address on a page is just text until it is wrapped in a mailto: link. Built as http:// instead, it becomes a request for a website that does not exist, which is why the browser sits there and then shows an error.

Where these defects come from

Not from carelessness. Nearly every one of them comes from the same sequence. A template gets chosen, real content gets poured into the top half of the homepage, the launch date arrives, and the parts nobody was looking at stay exactly as the template shipped them. The testimonials from another industry, the stock photographs, the tagline that still says tagline. Then the person who built it moves on, and the owner has no reason to open the site on a phone and tap their own phone number, because they already know their own number.

This is also why the check above is worth running even if you are happy with your website. It is not a judgment on the design. It is a list of things that go unnoticed by design.

What we do

We run this check for you and write down what we find

You send us the address of your website. We go through it on a phone and on a desktop and send back the specific items, with the exact page and the exact line, in plain language you can hand to whoever built it.

We fix the unfinished parts

Phone and email links that dial and open properly, contact forms that actually deliver and confirm, template text replaced with your own words, your real photographs in place of stock.

We build new sites for small businesses here

Straightforward websites for trades, shops and services in Atlantic County. Fast on a phone, clear about what you do and where you work, and finished, including the last ten percent.

We are in Galloway

We work across South Jersey and most of it is remote, and upon request we can come to you. Being nearby matters mostly because we know which towns you serve and how people here describe them.

What this will not do

Fixing these items will not by itself put you at the top of Google. They remove reasons for a visitor to leave, which is a different job from ranking.
A check on a website is not an audit of your business, your security, or your hosting. It is a read of what a customer encounters.
We cannot tell you how many calls a broken phone link has cost you. Nobody can, because those attempts leave no record. Anyone who quotes you a number for that is guessing.
If your site comes back clean, we will tell you that and there will be nothing for us to sell you that day.
We are a new company. If you want to see work before you decide anything, ask, and we will show you what we have built rather than describe it.

How it goes

You send the address of your website. That is all we need to start. One line, no form to fill in if you would rather not.
We look at it properly. On a phone and on a desktop, the same ten items above plus the ones that only show up on a particular site.
You get it in writing. A short list of what we found and where, yours to keep and yours to hand to anybody. Plenty of owners take that list and fix it themselves, and that is a complete outcome as far as we are concerned.
We do the work, only if you want it. If you would rather not spend the afternoon on it, we will.

Send us your website and we will look at it.

One line with the address is enough. We will run the same check we wrote out above and tell you what we find, whether or not it turns into work for us.

Send an inquiry

Polarity Management LLC, a registered New Jersey company, based in Galloway. Most of our work is remote, and upon request, we can travel to you.

Or write to inquiries@polarityagc.com, or call (609) 363-5141, and a person will answer you.

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